The neglected war hero Walter Tull, Britain’s first ever black Army officer,
inspired me to start my new novel 'A Medal for Leroy’ – but it was the
silences around my own family’s secret shame that enabled me to finish it .

Image 1 of 2

Michael Morpurgo has returned to the topic of World War One in his new novel, A Medal For Leroy. Photo: ANDREW CROWLEY

Image 1 of 2

Winning his spurs: Lt Walter Tull in his football kit
Photo: GETTY IMAGES

I sometimes think I should be lost for ideas without the help and suggestions of others, and of one fellow writer in particular, Michael Foreman. Of course he’s first and foremost an illustrator, among our very finest. He’s also a wonderful writer of his own stories, and the best of friends. On more than a dozen occasions, it has been Michael who has rung me up with an idea for a story, and almost every time it has resulted a year or so later as another of our many collaborations. Among the titles instigated by him are Arthur, High King of Britain; Billy the Kid; Farm Boy; Rainbow Bear; Not Bad for a Bad Lad and now our most recent title together, A Medal for Leroy.

Michael seems to have an unerring sense of not only what might spark my interest, but of what I am ready to write. He always seems to call at the right moment, when maybe I’m feeling my well of ideas and dreams has run dry.

“Walter Tull was the first black officer ever to serve in the British Army. This was the beginning of the First World War, a time when officers were not supposed to be black. They could only be privates and NCOs. Walter Tull was in the Middlesex Regiment. Promoted from Sergeant to Lieutenant in 1917, his soldiers loved him, would follow him anywhere. He was hugely respected. Mentioned on dispatches for “gallantry and coolness” while leading his soldiers on a raiding party in Italy somewhere, he was recommended for a Military Cross. But he died in March 1918 in France. Apparently a soldier couldn’t be awarded a Military Cross posthumously in those days. So he never got his medal.

“Do we know anything more about him?” I asked.

“Quite a lot. He grew up in an orphanage in Bethnal Green, played football for Spurs – he was one of the first black players in the Football League. Suffered quite a bit of racial abuse from the terraces. He then went on to play for Northampton Town. And when the war broke out in 1914 he was the first man in the team to join up. He fought on the Somme in 1916, Messines 1917, Ypres, and he was at Passchendaele too. He was killed in March 1918, leading his men forward to attack German positions at the Battle of Bapaume. Seems they never found his body. A statue in his memory was proposed in the Nineties, I think, to stand outside the Imperial War Museum, but the plans were turned down by Southwark Council. So no medal, no statue. Hardly right, is it?”

Michael left me with the idea. At first I was hesitant to take it any further. I had already written several stories about the First World War – War Horse, The Butterfly Lion,Farm Boy, Private Peaceful and The Best Christmas Present in the World. Like many writers, I live my stories intensely as I write. I was reluctant to go to the trenches again, to all that loss and suffering. And then I had some reservations about writing a novel too closely associated with the historical life of one man. But the more I thought about it, the more I was inspired by Walter Tull’s courage, from his childhood in an orphanage, to being abused from the terraces, and then his eagerness to join up and do his bit, his courage under fire and his heroic death in France. But what decided me to put pen to paper was the medal and the statue. I wanted him to have the medal he so clearly deserved, and to have his statue outside the Imperial War Museum, so that the children of today, black and white, can see for themselves how long and how honourably black people have been serving in the Armed Forces. I simply felt more people should know about this remarkable man, that they would be as inspired by him as I was.

Injustice has often spurred me on to write my stories. I read about the soldiers shot at dawn in the First World War for cowardice or desertion. There were more than 300 of them, including two who were shot for falling asleep on duty. It was clear to me that justice had not been done. Many were clearly suffering from shell shock. They were still shot. So I wrote Private Peaceful, the fictional story of one of them, but much of my story was gleaned from actual events in the trenches, from accounts of executions. Later, I wrote Alone on a Wide Wide Sea after discovering that many of the thousands of unwanted children and orphans who had been sent out to Australia just after the Second World War had ended up exploited and abused. There is injustice, too, in the way Walter Tull was treated in his own lifetime, and since.

And then there were other good reasons, more personal in nature, why I decided in the end to write A Medal for Leroy. The story is essentially about the unravelling of a family secret, the disclosure of hidden shame. I grew up in a middle-class family in south-east England just after the Second World War. My parents’ marriage was part of the collateral damage of that war and they divorced soon after. My brother Pieter and I were brought up by my mother and stepfather, Jack Morpurgo, a writer and editor, as Morpurgos. My birth father, Tony Van Bridge, an actor who later emigrated to Canada to work with Tyrone Guthrie, was effectively airbrushed from our lives. He didn’t come to see us, thinking it better for us to have one father and mother and an undisturbed childhood. He didn’t know us, having been away at the war, and we didn’t know him. He assumed that it was best just to keep away, until we were older, until we wanted to see him. So we never saw him. No one spoke of him. The divorce was never mentioned. We were seemingly one happy family:the Morpurgos. We soon had a stepbrother and a stepsister. And, let’s be clear, there were happy times, too.

But Pieter and I realised more and more as we grew up that a deception was going on, a secret was being hidden away. Divorce was a shameful thing in middle-class society in those post-war days, not to be spoken of. My mother, being a divorced woman, was even forbidden by her local church to take Holy Communion. So the whole affair was conveniently “forgotten” about. Until one evening on Easter Monday when I was about 19 (I’d still never met my birth father) when we were all sat around the television about to watch an adaptation of Great Expectations. My mother was sitting beside me. It was the scene at the beginning where Pip is making his way timorously through the graveyard, when suddenly a hideous figure rears up from behind a tombstone and grabs him. It is Magwitch, the escaped convict The actor was Tony Van Bridge. My mother gasped, grabbed my arm, “My God,” she breathed. “That’s your father!”

Suddenly, my father was there with us in our sitting room, family and friends all around: my secret father. The secret was out. And it is one that is now widely known.

But then there are family secrets that are never told, that remain a mystery for ever. A year or so ago my wife Clare’s last surviving aunt died. She was in her nineties. She was a spinster. She had been devoted all her life to her cousin, Allen Lane, Clare’s father and the founder of Penguin Books. Joan left a photograph of Allen, that she had kept by her bedside, to Clare. The frame was silver and rather tarnished, so when we got it home I polished it. As I was doing so, I noticed that the back of the frame, made only of cardboard, was loose. I took it off altogether. Hidden behind the photograph of Allen I found a small photograph of two young officers, by their uniforms clearly from the time of the Second World War. There were no names on the back. Who were they? Why had she hidden them? Who was she hiding them from?

The more I thought about Walter Tull, and about family secrets, the more the story began to weave itself in my head, and the more my fictional hero Leroy became himself, and not Walter Tull at all. Yet Leroy’s whole story could never have been written without Walter Tull – which is why the book is dedicated to him – nor without that phone call from Michael Foreman, who has illustrated the book so wonderfully.

I was concerned that the family of Walter Tull might be ambivalent about A Medal for Leroy. I needn’t have worried. They were very kind about the whole idea. I hope that they find the book as moving and insightful as I intended it to be, and that this story will serve as a way of remembering a great and good man who died too young. As John Tams’s glorious song in the National Theatre’s stage production of War Horse goes, we are in the end “only remembered for what we have done”. Walter Tull is remembered in my book, and in documentary films, too. But his memory should be honoured. He should have his medal. He should have his statue.